Ace Utilities Review
OK and Average, But There are a lot Better
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You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
GUI is attractive and easy to use. Other than absolute newbie’s there is no learning curve with this product and the flexibility to customize how routines are performed is a welcomed feature.
Something I found annoying with the product was the inability to maximize a window unless it was performed prior to beginning a task. I feel this is important because if you do not remember to maximize the window before you cannot appropriately read the data displayed from scan routines without physically moving the small task window out of the way and then sliding the horizontal bar from side to side. This problem is especially irritating when using a laptop or desktop with a small screen.
The ability to use a wizard to begin maintenance in novice or expert mode will be useful to many users and to avoid any accident or misjudgment in removing files and folders, when the product is first started a system restore point is created.
I also had greater expectations for the uninstaller. Most modern program uninstallers these days perform a post un-installation registry scan to remove orphaned entries. Ace Utilities does not perform this task and the separate act of performing a registry cleaning is required. Given the function already exists in the product, a registry cleaner, I would expect that feature to automatically perform a quick scan on the uninstalled application remnants only after uninstalling a program. Essentially Ace Utilities just uses the uninstaller application of the program being removed.
One of the nicer features is the ability to erase the Internet history of four different browsers. Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer and Firefox are certainly four of the most popular browsers and for users with multiple browsers installed this feature is well received.
Another feature I think falls perfectly into the realm of novice user is the registry cleaner. It is less aggressive when compared to competitive products. At least it was when compared to the other products I used to test the effectiveness of registry cleaning and unwanted file removal. I feel this is a positive attribute for novices to reduce the risk of doing harm to the all-so-important Windows registry.
ACE Optimizer Utilities does perform as advertised, but I believe it is over- priced when compared to other competitive programs that perform considerably more tasks. In my opinion it fits better in the $14.95 USD range and if it did I would fully recommend the product to novice users.
I feel the product will best serve the novice user with its simplicity and reliable performance, but it lacks some features that a more experienced user would appreciate. It does remove junk files, cleans invalid registry entries, locates empty folders & duplicate files, erases Windows history, fixes invalid shortcuts, shreds files, uninstalls programs, performs a disk analysis, start up program management and permits scheduled maintenance. It definitely has a lot of features and all seem to work as well as the competitors, and even faster than most of the competitors.